generic vs closed platforms

This worries me, too. I'm old enough to have first learned that a computer was a machine used by programmers to write and run programs. When desktop computers became everyday office and consumer appliances, there was no longer the expectation that the user would be a programmer, and most of these machines no longer even had the tools and libraries required to write software. Still, these were general-purpose computers that most certainly could be used for programming with some additional software.

Fast-forwarding to the present, the public is increasingly preferring to use a smartphone, tablet, or game console instead of a "computer". We all know these are all computers, but the public doesn't see it that way and doesn't expect these devices to be arbitrarily configurable or programmable.

So I think we are coming full circle - specialized devices are being used for specific applications, and the general-purpose computer is once again going to be just for programmers. I don't see it can really disappear, as there has to be a way to write code for all the specialized gadgets. Maybe OSS will come to dominate the desktop once the desktop is nothing more than a small niche for developers, kind of like how Linux already runs nearly all the world's fastest supercomputers.